AppHarvest

Indoor farmingUSA

New to Unitard

💀 Dead / Bankrupt

Peak $1 BillionToday

~-100%

from peak

🦄
Became a unicorn
Jan 2021
📈
Peak valuation
$1 Billion ’21
💔
Became a Unitard
Jul 2023
💸
Last valuation
Wiped out

Capital raised

$800M

Total raised

$396K/day

Raised per day

Total raised averaged per day over approximately 5.5 years from founding to bankruptcy or shutdown. This is not measured cash burn. Methodology

Funding: press/SEC/CNBC

Current status

Bankrupt 2023

The rise & fall

6 moments · 2018–2023

The key moments, with employee sentiment along the way.

Jan 2018

Founded in Morehead, Kentucky

Jonathan Webb pitches giant high-tech greenhouses as Appalachia's post-coal future.

CNBC

Jan 2021

The peak: a $1B SPAC debut$1B

Goes public as the first tomatoes ship from its 60-acre Morehead greenhouse, with Martha Stewart on the board.

CNBC

2021

The harvest disappoints

Operational problems and weak harvests force slashed guidance in year one as a public company; the stock craters.

Fortune

2022–23

Burning $800M to grow tomatoes

Heavy cash burn on new greenhouses outruns what the produce brings in.

Canary Media

2021–23

From the inside · Glassdoor reviews, 2021–23

Glassdoor reviews described a two-tier company — salaried office staff and hourly greenhouse workers split on pay, benefits and stock — with recurring accounts of mandatory six-day weeks in greenhouses topping 100°F. Insiders doubted production could ever scale as claimed.

Jul 2023

Chapter 11 — joins the Unitard Club 💔

Files for bankruptcy in July 2023 with essentially all value gone — about $800M raised, spent in five years.

Court filing

$1Bof peak value erased · 6 years

💬 entries paraphrase anonymous, unverified reviews posted publicly on Glassdoor ↗; dated facts carry their source.

How it happened

AppHarvest was a U.S. indoor/controlled-environment agriculture company that went public via SPAC in early 2021 at about a $1B valuation, touting large high-tech greenhouses. Operational problems, weak harvests, and heavy cash burn crushed its stock, and the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2023, losing essentially all value.

Source: Fortune/Canary Media

Where they went

Jonathan Webb
founder & CEO
Co-Founder & CEO at The Nuclear Company
LinkedIn ↗

Current roles as self-reported on LinkedIn, retrieved 2026-08-21. See our methodology.

Disclosed investors (17)

Historical funding participation; lists may be incomplete and do not establish current ownership or investor losses.

* Lead in a funding round · Crunchbase ↗ · 2026-10-13 · Methodology · Leaderboard